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From Our Own Correspondent: China's factories change gear

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Daily Life in Dongguan, China

27/04/2024 GMT

China's factories change gear

BBC World Service - From Our Own Correspondent, China's factories change gear

Dongguan looks different as firms shift to hi-tech products and workers must reskill

The 'workshop of the world' goes hi-tech as Made in China rebrands; cash vs digital payments in India; a Belgian museum tries to decolonise; a correspondent's life with a stutter.

Pascale Harter introduces dispatches from Dongguang in southern China, India's Karnataka state, Belgium's Museum of Central Africa and the Middle East. 

In the 1990s, the southern province of Guangdong became the export hub of the world - not just of the People's Republic of China - and during that time, hundreds of millions of people moved away from farming and into factory jobs. Today, many of those factories are now shifting from cheap mass-produced goods to more hi-tech products - and some of the old workforce is being left behind. Laura Bicker explores how the city of Dongguan has changed.

The village of Vandaraguppe is not far from India's hi-tech hub city of Bengaluru - and it was supposed to be a showcase for Narendra Modi's dreams of a fully 'digital India'. Jamie Coomarasamy has seen how its plans to go cashless didn't roll out entirely smoothly.

In Tervuren, near Brussels, Beth Timmins explores how a museum built to celebrate Belgian colonialism in Congo has come to interrogate it. But can a new context to its old exhibits and the return of artefacts really mend such deep historical wounds?

And Sebastian Usher reflects on how while reporting from across the Middle East, he's worked around a very personal hurdle: his stutter. 

Producer: Polly Hope
Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith
Production co-ordinator: Katie Morrison

(Image: Daily life in Dongguan. Photographer: Qilai Shen/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

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